Sunday, June 2, 2013

Last week i bought a new Hard Drive, a 3 TB Seagate. After connecting the Sata and power cables, I Powered On my computer and realized that my new drive was not being recognized during theBIOS POST message. So, I rebooted and this second time my drive was recognized, showing this message:

4th Master: ST3000... S.M.A.R.T Capable and status OK

But when I logged in (Windows xp), the drive was not listed. Going through a web search, I find the Seatools DiskWizard Utility. Using this program I could manage to format the drive and use the extended capacity (some system can only recognize up to 2 TB). I Powered off the computer and the next day, I realized that it was not being recognized again. It was only visible after rebooting the machine. Doing more research on the web, I stepped into this page on the Seagate website. It turns out that, in certain machines, the drive is not detected after cold boot, but is after warm boot or reset. The reason for this is that motherboard boots quickly before a hard drive has spun up and is ready. Because of my BIOS settings, my solution was to disable Quick Boot so that the motherboard will wait a little bit for the hard drive to become ready. I hope this will help someone the way it helped me...